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Sometimes a company’s greatest strength is brought out only after certain conditions are met. Sometimes these conditions can have steep costs (e.g. long integration time, expensive consulting etc) and other times, they can really be taxing (e.g. thriving under pressure, tight budgets etc). How can your B2B marketing strategy pitch these conditions without causing more than a few prospects to step back?

Accountability can be hard to define without first establishing a form of contract between two parties. In the case of yourself and your business prospects, an appointment setting campaign could be just the thing.

Willpower. It carries a lot of weight in the business world. From describing an executive’s conviction to the dedication of an employee, they all draw from the concept invoked by this single power word.

And like it or not, B2B marketing and sales constantly have to grapple with the willpower of potential clients in order to survive every quarter. Don’t take it as something personal or ethical. It’s just the nature of the beast.

You could even say it’s a very noble purpose. If people didn’t have their willpower tested, how will you know if it’s strong? Can an executive truly call himself convicted if his decisions weren’t regularly tested by his gut?

Therefore, don’t be ashamed to be the one doing the testing. Regardless of circumstance, even your own marketers have a lot of things they can take away:

It makes you immune to pretense – Prodding around for a subtle, psychological trigger doesn’t necessarily mean you’re emotionally manipulative (or at least to that degree). Alternatively, it can mean you’re good at guessing what people really want versus what they’re saying. Some people wear their desires on their sleeve but not all. Those who don’t are just as manipulative, using lies and facades to tell you that they don’t need your product. These pretenses are a poor substitute for willpower. But more than that, it’s a lesson worth teaching anyone (even your potential clients).

It tests your prospect’s willingness to commit –You also have the other half of the sales-marketing dynamic: lead quality. Lead quality is directly correlated with a prospect’s actions in your sales funnel. Just simply clicking and signing up on a landing page doesn’t always mean a lead is good. A prospect needs to have the right amount of willpower to stick to their buying decision too. And if the psychological tugs are what’s driving their decision, they could risk turning into disillusioned customers that only deliver shor-term value.

It requires you to see through your own tricks – From social media to search engine, prospects today have more access to information and are more likely to guard themselves against any marketing ‘tricks.’ Some call it the invasion of the introverts. Others say it was bound to happen anyways. But in any case, you need to start seeing through your own tricks so you’ll know how you’re going to keep them in the pipeline.

Willpower is not necessarily synonymous with irrational determination. It’s actually a mix of both. When a prospect is firm about their need (or lack of it), they’re logically more inclined to justify it. And if you don’t know how to test their defenses, you’ll both have difficulty trying to convince then and determining if they’ll really be good customers.

One particular marketing pitch you’ll run into on occasion usually starts with claiming a “shocking truth” on a particular subject. Whether it’s dieting or tax management, it’s like good marketing’s become synonymous with exposing the ‘ugly truth’ about something. Are B2B appointment setters the same?

Anyone who’s hoped to escape the popularity contests of highschool might be a little disappointed if they ever got a job in B2B marketing. The real challenge though isn’t just the fact that these contest are more intense from competing for high profile corporate attention. It’s also because all that intensity’s just been magnified as online technology throws itself in the mix with offline marketing.

It’s not really the fault of technology that more companies have increased integrating an online marketing approach (whether it’s just adding a page on Facebook or reformatting their email templates for mobile readers). It just sort of happened.

In business, few rules can truly stand the test of time. Ironically, one such rule is that you should always brace for change. This change can take you to unexpected places and sometimes cause you to uncomfortable decisions like changing the very core identity of your business.

When the time comes to change the party line, are your B2B marketers prepared?

With all this talk of big data, bigger CRM, and cross-channel automation, you’d think that everyone in the world of B2B marketing and sales is going to look like they work on a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier.

But in truth? In spite of all the tracking, sophisticated security, and big-time data crunching, sometimes it’s still better to go manual when you’re looking for sales leads.

With an age of information comes the race to capitalize it and at the same time, share the benefits of doing so. Yet unfortunately, that’s not usually the picture people have about it these days. Instead, everything from the most harmless lead generation campaigns up to your average government survey is viewed as suspect. “Privacy is dead” cry so many advocates.

Yet because out of fear of offending any such advocates (whether they’re in the telemarketing lists or among blog subscribers), many companies undermine their lead generation efforts.